Sustainability in the Cloud AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering, with millions of global users depending on it every day. To build a sustainable business for our customers and for the world we all share, we are designing data centers that provide the efficient, resilient service our customers expect while minimizing our environmental footprint—and theirs. Our Approach We focus on efficiency across all aspects of our infrastructure, from the design of our data centers and hardware to modeling the performance of our operations for continuous enhanced efficiency. We are on a path to power our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. These renewable energy investments help power our data centers, as part of our commitment to reach net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040. For AWS, operating sustainably also means reducing the amount of water we use to cool our data centers. Our holistic approach minimizes both energy and water consumption in our operations and guides the development of our water use strategy for each AWS Region where we operate. In addition, we work to reduce the carbon emitted during the extraction, manufacturing, and transportation of materials to data center construction sites. Reducing this embodied carbon offers a significant opportunity to cut our overall emissions from data centers. Energy Efficiency We are using innovation to improve power efficiency in multiple ways, including our investment in AWS-designed chips and the AWS Nitro System. For instance, AWS- designed Graviton3 is our most power-efficient general- purpose processor. Graviton3-based Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances use up to 60% less energy for the same performance than non-Graviton EC2 instances. With the world’s increasing need for computing and as machine learning has become mainstream, continually innovating at the chip level will be critical to sustainably powering the workloads of the future. AWS also continually innovates on cooling efficiency. For example, we worked with our vendors to optimize the longevity and airflow performance of the cooling medium used in our data center cooling systems. The new medium provides twice the service life and allows air to pass through more easily than previous iterations, saving fan energy. This has significant impacts on building energy performance, reducing the energy use of cooling equipment by 20%. Predicting and Tracking Performance We use advanced modeling methods, such as computational fluid dynamics tools, to optimize our data center design. This allows us to fully understand how the data center will perform before it is ever built, enabling us to optimize for higher reliability and energy efficiency in our systems. Once our data centers are operational, real-time, physics- based models allow us to further improve and optimize our designs. We build these custom models using AWS services and weather datasets from the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to predict system performance for our sites and track their performance against how they should be operating. Reducing Embodied Carbon In addition to emissions from our energy usage, AWS addresses a wide range of indirect emissions—including those associated with the construction of our data centers. Steel is one of the largest contributors of embodied carbon in the structure of AWS data centers and we are lowering these emissions by working with mills using electric arc furnace production processes. Unlike conventional steel produced from primary materials, coal, and gas, our suppliers are using up to 100% recycled content and are powered by electricity only, reducing embodied carbon up to 70%. We delivered six projects constructed with recycled steel in 2021 and will expand this to all future U.S. and European data centers moving forward. Concrete also contributes a large share of embodied carbon in data center construction, and AWS has multiple initiatives to reduce the carbon impact of the concrete required. For example, our design standards now require concrete with a 20% reduction in embodied carbon versus standard concrete for new U.S. data centers, and we are expanding this requirement globally. 5x AWS is up to five times more energy efficient than the average data center surveyed in Europe 3.6x AWS is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed 2021 Sustainability Report Introduction I Environment I Society I Governance I Appendix 35
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